Free Greek Book!

Awhile back I blogged my excitement over the Studies in New Testament Greek Collection being offered as a prepublication special. It is chock full of books that can help exegetes and Bible students benefit from advances in modern linguistics. But as I looked at the collection, there was one volume I was sad to see missing. So we did some digging and found that we had a license from the publisher for the title, but it hadn’t made it into the collection because the publisher wasn’t able to provide us with a physical copy of the book. Well, that’s no problem, since I have a copy. So I brought my book in and we got permission from the Powers That Be to add this valuable book into the collection at no additional cost to you!

The book in question is Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics: Open Questions in Current Research, edited by Stanley E. Porter and D. A. Carson. Half the book is dedicated to 5 essays on verbal aspect. One of the great debates in the study of biblical Greek has to do with whether or not verbal ‘tenses’, such as aorist and imperfect, actually communicate a temporal reference (indicating that the action of the verb taking place in the past, present or future) or whether they might not communicate something else entirely (aspect). Or do tenses sometimes convey time, sometimes aspect and/or sometimes both? In New Testament studies, the two most prominent voices in the early verbal aspect debate were Stanley Porter (also the author of Idioms of the Greek New Testament and the soon-to-be-released Handbook of Classical Rhetoric in the Hellenistic Period) and Buist Fanning. In this volume, there are essays from both Porter and Fanning introducing their approaches to verbal aspect and commenting on each other’s theories as well. These excellent essays are preceded by an introduction to the debate by D. A. Carson (author of Exegetical Fallacies), and followed by two more independent reviews of Porter and Fanning, one by Daryl D. Schmidt (author of Hellenistic Greek Grammar and Noam Chomsky) and the other by Moises Silva (author of the Philippians volume of the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament).

After the section on verbal aspect, the other half of the book is a potpourri of articles on other applications of modern linguistics to the Greek Bible, including essays from Jeffrey T. Reed (who wrote A Discourse Analysis of Philippians: Method and Rhetoric in the Debate over Literary Integrity, and co-edited Discourse Analysis and the New Testament: Approaches and Results, both books that are also in this incredible collection), Paul Danove (who wrote Linguistics and Exegesis in the Gospel of Mark: Applications of a Case Frame Analysis and Lexicon, which is also in the SGNT collection), Michael W. Palmer (author of Levels of Constituent Structure in New Testament Greek), and Mark S. Krause (co-author of the College Press NIV Commentary on John).

Biblical Greek Language and Linguistics is a great addition to this already brilliant collection of books. We’ve sweetened the deal, so if you were sitting on the fence before, it’s time to order so we can get this collection into production ASAP!

Comments

I think I already did order…thanks for this! I’ve wanted that book for a while! I really hope this prepub goes through because there are a number of other similar books that I would like to see coming through too!

Yeah a lot of good books in this one, especially the one’s by Porter. I read the one on Diglossa and “Discourse Analysis and other topics,” and enjoyed them.
Vincent do you know if there are plans to have the Porter and Fanning Verbal Aspect monographs (while I’m at it the entire series that includes the porter one would be great – including Decker and Lee). These books seem to me to be the perfect fit for Logos with very small print in the printed edition and lots of cross references.

Michael, I believe that Porter’s monograph is published by Peter Lang, and I don’t think we’ve licensed any books from them in the past. But we’d love to work with them. The best way to prove to the publisher that there is a market for doing the Peter Lang series of Greek monographs is to get all your friends to buy this collection!

Well, I’m definitely interested in both this set an the Peter Plan series.
I would love to have Palmer’s Levels of Constituent Structure and Wong’s A Classification of Semantic Case Relation in Logos!
So, again, I hope this set goes through!